Somebody should be reading this stuff.

Wilton Manors publishes almost everything it does. Agendas, resolutions, budgets, board minutes, meeting video. It is all public, and almost none of it is read. Island City Today reads it and tells you what it means — before the vote, not after.

Who is behind it

I'm Acceberannde. I lived in Wilton Manors from 2009 until the pandemic took me to Michigan for a year. I'm back in South Florida now, up in Deerfield Beach — close enough to be on the Drive most weeks, far enough that I can't vote in a city election and don't own property on the island.

I started this because I realized I couldn't tell you what the Commission was about to decide, and neither could anyone I asked. That seemed like a fixable problem.

How it is made

Most of what you read here is drafted by AI working from primary documents — the city's agenda system, adopted resolutions, budget PDFs, official calendars and the Broward Supervisor of Elections — with a documented review policy. That is not a disclaimer buried in a footer; it is how the thing works, and you should know it.

What that means in practice:

• Every factual claim links to the document it came from. If a sentence here has no source behind it, that is a bug. Tell us.
• When we are unsure, we say so in the piece rather than rounding up to confidence. You will see phrases like "we are still checking this" and we mean them literally.
• Nothing critical of a named person publishes without a human reading it first. No exceptions, no automation.
• We do not run a crime blotter. Arrest and incident coverage from public feeds is cheap to automate and does real harm to people who have been charged with nothing. Other outlets do it. We won't.

What this site will not do

We do not endorse candidates. Not this year, not in a future cycle. When we put questions to candidates, every candidate in a race gets the same questions, the same word count, and their answers in their own words. Where we can't reach a candidate we say we couldn't reach them, rather than characterizing someone who hasn't spoken to us.

We are independent. Island City Today is not affiliated with, endorsed by or funded by the City of Wilton Manors, any candidate or campaign, any business, or any political organization. "The Island City" is the city's own nickname and belongs to its residents; this site has no official standing whatsoever.

Directory listings are free and cannot be bought. A business cannot pay for a listing, pay to be featured, or pay to have something removed. If that ever changes, it will be labeled on the page before it changes.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. When we do, we fix the error in place, leave a note at the bottom of the piece saying what changed and when, and do not quietly delete anything.

If something here is wrong — a fact, a date, a business that closed, your own name — write tocorrections@islandcitytoday.com and it will be looked at by a person. Corrections take priority over everything else we are working on.

Privacy

This site sets no tracking cookies. Your saved listing IDs stay in your browser. We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. We count aggregate save, plan and source-link actions without recording the selected listing or your identity. For the newsletter we also keep daily totals, per sign-up form, of how often the form was shown, how often a sign-up went through and how often the sign-up prompt on articles was closed. Those totals record only which form it was, such as the one at the end of a guide, never your address or which article or listing you were on. To limit abuse, each time your browser sends a form or one of these counts, our server keeps a short-lived identifier: a one-way hash of your network address mixed with a secret key, the hour, and which form or count it was. It can’t be turned back into your address and holds nothing else. It expires after two hours and is deleted the next time any visitor’s request starts a new hourly count. If you subscribe to the newsletter, your browser sends your address straight to Kit, the service that sends the newsletter, and it goes nowhere else. You confirm by clicking a link we email you, and you can leave with one click. We never sell, share or rent the list.

On articles and guides, a small newsletter prompt can appear once you are partway through. If you close it, or sign up anywhere on the site, your browser keeps one note of that and the date (in local storage, under “ict-newsletter-prompt”), so the prompt stays away for a month after you close it and a year after you sign up. The note never leaves your browser, and clearing your site data removes it.

Accessibility

We aim for WCAG 2.2 AA: keyboard-operable controls, visible focus, labeled forms, readable contrast, and text that can be enlarged to 200% without losing anything. The Drive map has a text alternative in the directory. If something here does not work for you, write tohello@islandcitytoday.com and we will fix it.

Contact

General:hello@islandcitytoday.com

Own a business in Wilton Manors? Listings are free —find yours in the directory and email us anything that needs changing, or send us a business that is missing.

Running an event? Send it and we will put it onthe calendar. Community organizations, city boards and neighborhood associations are all welcome.